the end of old Sedley, the end of old Osborne, are as pathetic and humane as anything in our literature.  Mature men, who study fiction with a critical spirit and a cool head, admit that the only passages in English romance that they can never read again without faltering, without a dim eye and a quavering voice, are these scenes of pain and sorrow in Vanity Fair.  The death of old Sedley, nursed by his daughter, is a typical piece—­perfect in simplicity, in truth, in pathos.

One night when she stole into his room, she found him awake, when the broken old man made his confession.  “O, Emmy, I’ve been thinking we were very unkind and unjust to you,” he said, and put out his cold and feeble hand to her.  She knelt down and prayed by his bed-side, as he did too, having still hold of her hand.  When our turn comes, friend, may we have such company in our prayers.

And this is the arch-cynic and misanthrope, grinning at all that is loveable and tender!

It is too often forgotten that Vanity Fair is not intended to be simply the world:  it is society, it is fashion, the market where mammon-worship, folly, and dissipation display and barter their wares.  Thackeray wrote many other books, and has given us many worthy characters.  Dobbin, Warrington, Colonel Newcome, Ethel Newcome, Henry Esmond are generous, brave, just, and true.  Neither Esmond, nor The Newcomes, nor The Virginians are in any sense the work of a misanthrope.  And where Thackeray speaks in his own person, in the lectures on the English Humourists, he is brimful of all that is genial, frank, lenient, and good-hearted.  What we know of the man, who loved his friends and was loved by them, and who in all his critical and personal sketches showed himself a kindly, courteous, and considerate gentleman, inclines us to repel this charge of cynicism.  We will not brand him as a mere satirist, and a cruel mocker at human virtue and goodness.

This is, however, not the whole of the truth.  The consent of mankind, and especially the consent of women, is too manifest.  There is something ungenial, there is a bitter taste left when we have enjoyed these books, especially as we lay down Vanity Fair.  It is a long comedy of roguery, meanness, selfishness, intrigue, and affectation.  Rakes, ruffians, bullies, parasites, fortune-hunters, adventurers, women who sell themselves, and men who cheat and cringe, pass before us in one incessant procession, crushing the weak, and making fools of the good.  Such, says our author, is the way of Vanity Fair—­which we are warned to loathe and to shun.  Be it so:—­but it cannot be denied that the rakes, ruffians, and adventurers fill too large a canvas, are too conspicuous, too triumphant, too interesting.  They are more interesting than the weak and the good whom they crush under foot:  they are drawn with a more glowing brush, they are far more splendidly endowed.